Creativity Challenge Week Two
Continuing the review of my blog posts from 2010, when I was about to turn 30. Here’s my reflection on adding more creativity to my days. It reminds me, now, of the importance of this practice.
November 2010
This latest project, daily creating and dancing with words, has been one of the most joyful life-enhancing things I have done in 2010. And so simple!
In 2009, I purchased a pack of crayons and let rip on the page. Doodling and adding rainbow colours to anything I could. Again a simple creative pleasure. A bit like moving for the fun of it, for the elbow-speaking-to-wrist of it, dancing to a tune in one’s room, stretching in a Yoga pose. All these easy-if-you-let-them-beesy actions that, for me, add a massive amount of happiness and peace to my days. And I feel so much more self-expressed for it. Which again affirms for me something that I’ve thought and felt for a long time: creativity gives us greater self-expression, a re-discovery of fullness that brings with it an increased sense of wellbeing.
I look forward to exploring this link in future projects and workshops.
Have fun taking a moment to bring more creative expression into your day – or perhaps simply more awareness of the creativity already there – whether through baking, making, tying your shoe-laces up strangely or doing any silly thing that makes your heart sing.
Here’s Week Two’s Challenge. As I read this Alice’s words, I see aspects of myself reflected back to me. I see where I still hold, where my edges are, my anxieties and fears, where I still push myself with a perfectionist poke. Perspective also allows me to see where I have loosened, strengthened, expanded – and the impact on my world. Another gift of having a creative practice is that it speaks to us, and others, across the ages.
Week Two: Lists!
I walked into week two of November’s creative challenges without having consciously decided the theme for the week. I seemed to spend Monday racing around, trying and failing to meet the day’s micro-challenges I’d set myself on my internal LIST OF THINGS TO DO.
And so a theme was born: Lists!
Please feel free to browse this week’s creative offerings and send in some of your own too!
With a note to the last entry: Something’s Cooking. I made a tasty word-meal for you, it was written about a relative who is no longer here. Having consulted a family member, we agreed that the poem could be misinterpreted and so was not so appropriate for posting on the w to the w to the w.
Some meals are the kind of food you should only serve at home.
Onto Lists!
November 15th
She Gets Things Done
The Squirm
begins.
Racing ahead to the future,
stomach left behind
looploop
ride
grasping for the safety bars
strategy and frame
if she could just sit down for one minute and write a list of all she’s done this morning –
she catches herself.
Smiles at the absurdity
of Projected Reality
as it sprints neck and neck with Urgency
to a future where she is so productive.
Where did she get this notion?
This finish-line marker
chalked ahead of herself?
She grabs the chalk and draws faces on the pavement.
Balances on one foot.
Throws questions up in the air and sits down smiling
as warm rain falls gently.
She’d like to stay here a while.
….
Fat Freddy’s Drop have written a beautiful lyric which I had posted up on a noticeboard for a long while:
‘The race is on and I’m quickly standing still,
’cos I have faith in something more than my will: soul’
Just thought I’d share that.
….
